Giving to the History Department

Alumni & Friends News

The online journal Common-place recently released a special issue on “Music and Meaning in Early America,” which features the article “Partners in Time” by Prof. April Masten. Drawing on her new research, Prof. Masten discusses affinities between African American and Irish jigs, and the methodological challenges of interpreting the history of dance.

An enormous honor has been given to Evelyne and Doug Skopp in the dedication of SUNY Plattsburgh’s Holocaust Memorial Gallery. The link below is for further details about the gallery and the recent dedication ceremony:http://www.plattsburgh.edu/alumni/collegefoundation/holocaustgallery.phpEvelyne and Doug are overwhelmed by this most generous gesture by their former students and colleagues.

Congratulations to our colleagueCarla Keirns on receiving a multi-year research grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her project looks at how end-of-care costs vary depending on where one lives. Drawing on her experience as a practicing palliative-care physician, sociologist, health services researcher, and historian, Dr. Keirns will use health utilization data, interviews, and community studies to make sense of individual choices and regional patterns that are fundamental to understanding how to empower patients, improve care and reduce costs. Carla joins a distinguished group of investigators doing pathbreaking research in healthy policy. You can read more about the award and the program here.

Dr. Elizabeth R. Ewen passed away on 29 May 2012. Dr. Ewen, who earned her Ph.D. at Stony Brook, was Distinguished Teaching Professor of American Studies at SUNY-Old Westbury. In collaboration over many years with her husband Stewart Ewen and her colleague Ros Baxandal, Dr. Ewen published extensively on U.S. society. Some of their notable works included Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness, and Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality.

Dr. Ewen was also well known to the History Department, in a personal as well as professional capacity, as the daughter of Roger Wunderlich, who also received his Ph.D. from the department. She is deeply missed in both regards.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Fellowships to a diverse group of 181 scholars, artists, and scientists in its eighty-eighth annual competition for the United States and Canada. One of this year’s recipients: Mrinalini Sinha, Stony Brook History Ph.D., who is an Alice Freeman Palmer Professor in the Department of History and Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anti-colonialism, gender, and transnational approaches. She has recently become interested in the different forms of political imaginings, beyond the nation-state, that animated anti-colonial thought in India at least until the interwar period. Her Guggenheim project, with the title “Complete Political Independence: The Curious History of a Nationalist Indian Demand,” will explore the contingency of the development of the nation-state form in India. Congratulations!